He laughed. "You didn't expect me to give her a hard punch in the eye, did you?"
"No, of course I didn't expect you to give her a hard punch in the eye. But I should have thought you'd have had more sense of your own dignity than to take no notice and invite her to have a talk one day."
He thought, "Here we are again!" He said, "Well, but look, Mabel. I don't think she means it for rudeness. She is rude of course, beastly rude; but, you know, that manner of hers always makes me feel frightfully sorry for her."
"Yes, haven't you noticed many people like her with that defiant sort of way of speaking--people not very well educated, or very badly off, or in rather a dependent position, and most frightfully conscious of it. They think every one is looking down on them, or patronising them, and the result is they're on the defensive all the time. Well, that's awfully pathetic, you know, all your life being on the defensive; back against the wall; can't get away; always making feeble little rushes at the mob. By Jove, that's pathetic, Mabel."
"I say I'm not listening. I always know that whenever I say anything about any one I dislike, you immediately start making excuses for them, so I simply don't listen."
He mastered a sudden feeling within him. "Well, it wasn't very interesting," he said.
"No, it certainly wasn't. Pathetic!" She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "You think such extraordinary things pathetic; I wonder you don't start an orphanage!"
He halted and faced her. "Look here, I think I'll leave you here. I think I'll go for a bit of a walk."
At The Precincts the increasing habit of seeing the other side of things was confined, in its increasing exemplifications of how impossible he was to get on with, to the furiously exciting incidents of public affairs; but the result was the same; the result was that, just as, on opening his door on return home at night, he had that chill and rather eerie feeling of stepping into an empty house, so, on entering the office of a morning, he came to have again that sensation that it was a deserted habitation into which he was stepping; no welcome here; no welcome there. He began to look forward with a new desire for the escape and detachment of the bicycle ride; he began to approach its termination at either end with a sense of apprehension, gradually of dismay.
